"Fast car" is kind of a continuation of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." It has all the clawing your way to a better life, but in this case the protagonist never makes it with her love; in fact she is dragged back down by him.
There is still an amazing amount of hope and will in the lyrics; and the lyrics themselve rank and easy five. If only music was stronger it would be one of those great radio songs that you hear once a week 20 years after it was released. The imagery is almost tear-jerking ("City lights lay out before us", "Speeds so fast felt like I was drunk"), and the idea of starting from nothing and just driving and working and denigrating yourself for a chance at being just above poverty, then losing in the end is just painful and inspiring at the same time.
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's five o'clock in the morning
And you're just getting in
You knock on the door
And a voice sweet and low says who is it
She opens up the door and lets you in
Never once asks where have you been
She says are you hungry?
Did you eat yet?
Let me hang up your coat
Pass me your hat
All the time she's smiling
Never once raises her voice
It's five o'clock in the morning
You don't give it a second thought
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
The sweetest woman in the world
Could be the meanest woman in the world
If you make her that way
You keep hurting her
She'll keep being quiet
She might be holding something inside
That'll really, really hurt you one day
I see you're in the hospital
Bandaged from foot to head
In a state of shock
Just that much from being dead
You couldn't believe the girl
Would do something like this, ha
You didn't think the girl had the nerve
But here you are
I guess action speaks louder than words
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's five o'clock in the morning
And you're just getting in
You knock on the door
And a voice sweet and low says who is it
She opens up the door and lets you in
Never once asks where have you been
She says are you hungry?
Did you eat yet?
Let me hang up your coat
Pass me your hat
All the time she's smiling
Never once raises her voice
It's five o'clock in the morning
You don't give it a second thought
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
The sweetest woman in the world
Could be the meanest woman in the world
If you make her that way
You keep hurting her
She'll keep being quiet
She might be holding something inside
That'll really, really hurt you one day
I see you're in the hospital
Bandaged from foot to head
In a state of shock
Just that much from being dead
You couldn't believe the girl
Would do something like this, ha
You didn't think the girl had the nerve
But here you are
I guess action speaks louder than words
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
It's a thin line between love and hate
Lyrics submitted by spliphstar
Thin Line Between Love and Hate Lyrics as written by Richard Poindexter Jackie Members
Lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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Fast Car
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This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
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I don't know if I get the meaning right, but at first I thought that it dealt with the story of a woman whose husband always comes back late, never telling her where he has been. She never asks, anyway. Everytime he comes back late, she keeps being sweet, kind to him, so that the husband never "gives a second thought": to him, she's a devoted wife. Even when he hurts her, she does not say a word : she's keeping everything inside. But she suffers. And that's when she commits suicide. That is how I understand the fact that she's in a hospital, bandaged from foot to head : she may have tried to jump from a building or something. And she herself is shocked by what she has done (which can be explained by the fact that a lot of people who commit suicide don't really want to die, they just want "a new start"). But I'm aware that some details don't fit with that. For example, with the chorus saying : "it's a thin line between love and hate", you would expect that the love and hate is between the man and his wife, though it may refer to self-love and self-loathing (it's far-fetched, isn't it?) Then, why the line "...that'll really really hurt you one day" : if the man is such an ***, then I can't see why his wife's suicide would "hurt him" that much : one would have expected the woman to try to kill her husband or something... Anyway, there IS something I don't understand ! (maybe the song is about two women ?? A mother and a daughter ? But then who tries to kill who ???? arrrgrh)